Page 56 of How to Say I Do
Wyatt shifted into Drive, but he didn’t take his foot off the brake. “Partner?”
“Harrison told me—he told everyone, actually—that if I pull off this wedding, and if theEliteFashion Week parties go well, he’s going to sign me on to a partnership.”
Goodbye, Murray Hill. Hello, twenty million a year. Where would I live? I hadn’t even begun to dream about a future where I was Harrison’s business partner.
“And I guess this is my partnership redemption arc or something because I was theonlyperson in all of New York who didn’t know that Jenna and I were just using each other for our careers. Her for all my connections, me to secure a partnership—apparently—but I guess no one bothered to mention that. Surprise!”
Wyatt merged, the turn signalclick-clickingin the sudden silence. I’d said too much. He didn’t care about any of that.
We let ten miles tick down in silence. He fiddled with the air conditioner as we passed a sign that announced the next town was forty miles ahead. “EliteFashion Week parties?”
We had a long drive to go his ranch with a lot of dead air to fill, and fill it I did. If you got me rattled and put me in a box, I was going to chatter until you stapled my mouth shut. Locked in with Wyatt, going seventy miles an hour toward the downward arc of the afternoon sun, the scent of daisies and the rot of my emails as unwelcome ghosts riding shotgun with us? I should have just flung myself from the truck and let the road take care of the rest.
I rambled: about the pointlessness of planning now for these Fashion Week parties, and how I was signing NDAs that rivaled nuclear security clearances to gain access to the premier designer’s fall lines while they were still frantically digging for their sparks of creative passion. Planning anything now was an exercise in futility because at least half of these designers would throw out their first iterations and go with something completely different, which meant I’d be the one scrambling after they decided on a whole new show, which meant a whole new theme, which meant I would need to start from scratch—
Wyatt nodded along, throwing out a sympathetichmmand even anoh, wowevery now and then. I was probably boring him down to bones.
My heartbeat cranked up to two hundred when we turned down the shaded drive leading to his ranch. I’d tried to convince myself that my fragile emotional state and my bat-shit insanity over seeing Wyatt again had thrown all my senses that first time. I wasn’treallyremembering all those awe-inspiring colors correctly, or recalling the exact crispness of sky against field, or the softness of the light that caressed his house.
But nope, I’d remembered accurately. There was his home, just as beautiful as I’d stamped into my memories. Tulips and poppies and lilac, oak and pecan and elm. Pale-yellow paint, snow-white trim. Golden roses. Bright-red door. Mariah would be so proud. It was all so beautiful, so stunningly beautiful.
Wyatt led the way inside, carrying the pastries, the flowers, and his little bag of bolts. I grabbed the produce before he could take that, too. We went to the kitchen, where he quietly put away the food and filled a vase with water.
I stuck out like a bruise, hanging around and drumming my fingers on his granite counter. Wyatt wouldn’t look my way, so I fucked off after thirty seconds to look at the framed photos hanging on the walls.
Wyatt had photoseverywhere. They were mostly family shots, some posed but mostly candid. These were all older than the Cancun photos hanging down the hall.
There was Wyatt holding a newborn Jason, him and Liam and Savannah still looking like kids themselves. There were the four of them in Wyatt’s kitchen, celebrating Jason’s first birthday and then Wyatt’s twenty-first. In the oldest photo, Wyatt and Liam were teenagers, Wyatt with the beginnings of the broad sturdiness he carried so definitively now. There were no pictures of Wyatt’s father or mother. There were no baby Wyatts or sunburned cheeks or little boy Wyatt and Liam playing in the backyard.
“We lost everything in the fire,” Wyatt said, as if he could read my mind. “All the family photos are gone. There are some official sheriff’s photos of my dad out there, but I don’t have any of the four of us. So now I put ’em all up. I want to see everyone’s faces all the time. Every moment, every day I can.”
I turned, and Wyatt dropped his gaze—had he been looking at me?—as he cleared his throat. He had his hand on a bottle of wine that he’d set on the kitchen island between two wine glasses, a beautiful dark bottle with a devastatingly simple label: Son’s Tears petite sirah. His father’s wine.
Wyatt poured two glasses, watching the garnet flow like he was pouring out his soul.
A flare of bitchiness cracked like a whip inside me. “So it’s available now?” I wanted to be belligerent. I was trying to pick a fight.Say something Wyatt, God, say anything.
He set the bottle down with acrack.
This was the conundrum of me: how could I make things worse? I’d always pick the wrong choice when my heart was on the line.
Wyatt slid one of the wine glasses across the counter. The move was so familiar—sitting so close, a plumeria between us—that it tore at the debris of my heart.
At the least, alcohol would start to numb this feeling. I snatched up my glass.
One sip—swirl of rubies, complicated histories, breeze-filled summers, little-boy laughs—and I was overcome.
The petite sirah tasted like Wyatt: like a broken-hearted man, and a boy who’d had the world at his feet, happiness drawn in every color of his reality, and then had gone to football practice and come home to his parents’ burned and bullet-riddled bodies. A boy whose brother had bled sideways and careened off course, and a man who’d rebuilt their lives—and the home I was standing in—board by board, nail by nail, and drawn his family back together one heart string at a time. He’d planted his father’s dreams, cradled his brother’s future, and had given his soul to everyone else to keep their worlds spinning. And after all ofthat, he’d gone to Mexico for his brother’s wedding and had found the space to make a howling, miserable, selfish man feel cherished and adored.
Shame burned me alive. I didn’t deserve this sip, or this glass, or this wine. Or this man. I didn’t deserve him at all. I didn’t even deserve his glance.
So it was damn good that he still wasn’t looking at me.
I set the wine down. A hallway off the kitchen led to the back porch. On one side was the bathroom, and on the other, a french-door-clad sunroom, brilliantly lit up by the afternoon light. I’d meant to check it out last time, but after my awful realization that there was no fixing things between Wyatt and me, I’d shut down and entered survival mode, doing my all to muscle through the remaining hours with Tessa, Tyler, and Peanut. Now, I needed an escape, and that sunroom, as still and silent as a diamond, seemed to be the answer.
I walked away, and Wyatt didn’t try to stop me.
CHAPTER16
